I saw the theatre as a poor, puny, weak little old man, the last living member of a once rugged dynasty, supported by nurses and peeking out the great gloomy window of a decaying mansion. Surrounding him were fifteen doctors, all well intentioned, who guided, watched over, washed, put to bed, physicked and fumigated the little moribund within an inch of his life. Across his pyjamas was printed The Theatre, and what he was peeking out the window at was a big twilly in her working clothes on the sidewalk.

She wore high-button shoes with white tops, a checkered dress, very tight around the waist, a wide, patent-leather belt, a feather boa, a big hat with ostrich plumes, and the self-confident smile of a female who knows that what she has, they want. Across her superb frontal elevation was printed The Movies. As I watched, she turned and winked good-naturedly at the little old man inside the great mansion, a wink of such vulgarity and epic proportions that it shattered the plate glass as it went through the window, and blew the little group fluttering back into the shadows. She laughed, then noticing me said, "Come up and see me some time.”

Kristen Iskandrian’s first novel, Motherest, is told in first-person by 18-year-old Agnes, who lives in “the middle of a New Jersey nowhere” and has just begun college in “the middle of a New England nowhere” in 1993.

I first saw Barbara Browning when she was naked, one hand extended to open a shower curtain, in our shared dorm bathroom, when we were both in our late teens. Barbara wore her hair short then, and her compact little body was so unapologetically whole, not a series of parts in the way I considered my own body to be.

In Visceral Poetics, poet Eleni Stecopolous' recent book on, among other things, struggling with chronic pain while trying to write a dissertation about Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopolous writes about her frustration with being undiagnosable.